Roo Reynolds - What’s Next?

Photo by Andy Piper. Used here with permission.

The recent few days of hot weather seems to be coming to an end. To celebrate it while it still lasts, here’s a photo Andy took yesterday of some friends enjoying the sun on the steps of Hursley House. Left to right: Hanan, James, Rob, Helen, Alice and me.

IBM Hursley really is a beautiful location. Here it is from a slightly different angle, taken last week by Darren. (He describes the process of making a 360 degree panorama on his blog).

Photo by Darren Shaw. Shared under a Creative Commons license.

If Darren wasn’t out in Arizona (taking even more amazing photos) with Ian, they both would have been on the steps with us above. I’m not sure if they would have been eating ice creams or would have stuck with the traditional cup of tea though.

Reminiscing about childhood games last night, my friend Arthur wondered out loud how marbles are made. Nick and I googleraced to find the answer, and (unsurprisingly) both ended up finding the same bit of video.

‘How It’s Made‘ is surely one of the most interesting series on Discovery (perhaps beaten by Mythbusters). The marble video caused us to go on a mini knowledge quest, in which we learned how many other things were made. Golf balls, bubblegum, jawbreakers all have extrusion in common with marbles (though are fractionally less cool), while filing cabinets are about as interesting as they deserve to be. Aren’t the internets brilliant?

I was at Game Camp 08 on Saturday. It was held in Sony’s 3Rooms building near Shoreditch which is amazing. Imagine your dream flat, but full of rather more PS3s and PSPs than you could ever need. That said, the Sony branding wasn’t actually overpowering, and the venue was a very good choice.

The day was held in the style of a barcamp, with sessions run by participants. There were sessions on ‘How to play Doerak, a semi-russian card game’, ‘ARGs, are they f****d’?', ‘Playing SLorpedo (mixed reality naval warfare in Second Life)’, and many many more.

Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian organised the event and has since written up a conclusion as well as a quick review of one of the busiest sessions, Matt Biddulph on ‘hacking game controllers with Arduino’.

Lots of photos of the day on Flickr, including this great one taken by Justin Hall (lead PMOG genius) and shared my Matt Jones.

London’s first Game Camp was great. I’m already looking forward to the next one.

I joined the IBM Hursley ETS (Emerging Technology Services) team just a few weeks after their first Rocket Day in 2005. Today was version 2.0, and it was the most fun team-building day out you can imagine; a field full of geeks and their (water, air and coke-and-mentos powered) rockets, cameras, access to good food and great beer. Good times.

I took some photos and videos, and there’s also a Flickr group containing photos from the day.

Best of all, Rob made a video which includes some footage captured using a tiny camera fixed to the nose of one of the rockets. There’s a long version on YouTube. Here’s the short ‘trailer’ version (music by yours truly).

Before there were blogjects, there were blobjects. In the closing speech at SIGGRAPH 2004, Bruce Sterling started by talking about blobjects, or blob-shaped consumer items.

Blobjects are the period objects of our time. They are the physical products that the digital revolution brought to the consumer shelf.

Sterling goes on (via ‘gizmos’, the current state of the art) to introduce spime.

At the moment, you are end-using Gizmos. My thesis here, my prophesy to you, is that, pretty soon, you will be wrangling Spimes.

This subject is covered more completely in his Shaping Things book, which is reviewed here by Cory Doctorow. Cory handily sums up Spime thus:

A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities

Meanwhile, to fill the gap between blobjects and spime, we have blogjects. Julian Bleecker’s ‘Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things‘ introduces Blogjects, describing them as an “early ancestor” to spime. While spime is still speculative, Bleecker says

I can make Blogjects now because the semantics are immediately legible — objects, that blog. Tonight, I can go into my laboratory and begin to experiment with what a world might be like in which I co-occupy space with objects that blog.

Bleecker says there are three key characteristics of a blogject:

• Blogjects track and trace where they are and where they’ve been;
• Blogjects have self-contained (embedded) histories of their encounters and experiences
• Blogjects always have some form of agency — they can foment action and participate; they have an assertive voice within the social web.

The last point is important, and while he’s not expecting them to pass the Turing test, they need to interact. Good bloggers don’t ignore their comments; thats where most of the fun happens. In the same way, blogjects participate and converse both between themselves and with us.

The significance of the Internet of Things is not at all about instrumented machine-to-machine communication, or sensors that spew reams of data credit card transactions, or quantities of water flows, or records of how many vehicles passed a particular checkpoint along a highway. Those sensor-based things are lifeless, asocial recording instruments when placed alongside of the Blogject. … The social and political import of the Internet of Things is that things can now participate in the conversations that were previously off-limits to Things. … Things, once plugged into the Internet, will become agents that circulate food for thought, that “speak on” matters from an altogether different point of view, that lend a Thing-y perspective on micro and macro social, cultural, political and personal
matters.

If a blogject is an object that blogs, a tweetject is clearly an object that tweets (an intransitive verb: the act of using Twitter).

There are already lots of examples of objects using Twitter to interact with people, usually to report about the state of things in a convenient form. Botanicalls is an interesting project, aimed at “enhancing person-plant communication” using tools that can be used by people as well as plants. As a result, Pothos is a plant that knows when it needs watering (learn how to make your own).

Gareth Jones wrote about getting his laptop to tweet when Bluetooth devices come in and out of range. For a while that script was updating as gareth_laptop on Twitter. As long as some relevant mobile phones and laptops have Bluetooth enabled, there are some useful and interesting elements of personal presence detection here. Who is nearby? With some additional second-order agents running to work out what these devices are and what they mean (is Gareth at home? If he’s at work, who is nearby?).

Andy Stanford-Clark has an impressively complex home automation setup in his house on the Isle of Wight. It’s been online for a few years already, but has more recently been exposed via Twitter as andy_house. (Although Kelly raises bots as one of her Twitter pet peeves, she makes an exception for Andy’s house.) Andy also Twitter-enabled the Red Jet ferries which go to and from the Isle of Wight, where he lives.

There are many more tweetjects out there too.

There have been lots of weather bots on Twitter for a long time. Here’s one for Brighton and here are links to many more. Radio 1 is tweeting the playlist and summary information about listeners’ text messages. Mario Menti set up a lot more BBC bots too. Tom Morris hooked the various London tube lines up to Twitter. The Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank tweets what it’s pointing at (and it’s not alone). Tower Bridge lets us know when it’s opening and closing (and for what). The Heavens Above user updates Londoners with the times and directions of Iridium flares and International Space Station flybys over their city.

There are many more, and lots more will no doubt be added this year. Currently, most Twitter bots are one-directional. Things will get really interesting when more of them converse as well as simply report.

Further reading:

• In this post I’ve already linked to both Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling (and the 2004 SIGGRAPH speech), as well as Julian Bleecker’s ‘Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things‘ essay.
• Everyware by Adam Greenfield is relevant, though it deals mainly with the near-term. Andy Piper has a review which you might find helpful.
• OpenSpime is a project to enable “individuals and corporations to better understand their environment, through the use of a series of GPS-enabled sensors”. Read Tish Shute’s introduction on UgoTrade too.

I’m packing for SXSW tomorrow (Thursday) morning.

I’ve pulled together a (rough) schedule, thanks to the lovely SCHED (sched.org). This is a bit more complete than my previous list of things-not-to-miss. Of course, that list still contains the panel I’m sitting on (’Stories, Games and Your Brand’) with Rachel Clarke, Jeremy Ettinghausen and Dan Hon. We might have a quiet time of it, since the Mark Zuckerberg keynote is scheduled to happen at the same time. So we’re going to be ultra-careful not to even mention you-know-what, in a first panelist to do so buys the beers type way. Isn’t everyone bored of it by now anyway? :-)

My event wishlist is long, but I’m particularly excited by Andy Baio’s unpanel (including Merlin Mann and many more) entitled ‘Worst Website Ever: That’s So Crazy, It Just Might Work’ a chance for “smart people to be stupid” and propose their “worst possible startup ideas”, which sounds like it will be very funny.

In addition to the various panels and keynotes, there are a great many informal events running too. There are even more parties and events on Upcoming. Here are few which are catching my eye:

• Saturday morning: Kick! - an informal kick-ball (whatever that is) game, hosted by Six Apart
• Saturday afternoon: Flickrite meetup
• Saturday evening: Google party
• Sunday night: Moo/Etsy/Timbuk2/Threadless party
• Monday night: 20×2 (Twenty speakers. One Question. Two minutes each)
• Monday night: The Great British Booze-up

I’ll also be dropping into BlogHaus and hoping to catch Hugh MacLeod there and maybe even get an original cartoon-on-the-back-of-a-business-card.

Update: Note to self (and anyone else who is affected) it’s really really important not to forget that daylight savings time starts on the morning of 9th of March. (I don’t think it starts in the UK until the 30th of March this year.)

Three different physics games I’ve been enjoying recently. You might like them too.

1 - Toribash (Mac, Windows) is my favourite fighting game ever. The physics, rendering and tense multiplayer action make it an instant addiction.

2 - Crayon Physics (Windows) is the freeware prototype of something which went on to become the eagerly awaited Crayon Physics Deluxe (the one shown in the video below).

3 - Phun (Windows and Linux) is a fun 2D physics playground. Experiment with gravity, friction, springs, motors, and more. It looks a bit like this

It seems to be inspired by the MIT Magic Paper demo (shown in the video below).

Everyone who has ever had a piano in their house has surely at some point tried getting sound out of the instrument without pressing the keys. As a schoolboy, I’d find ways to reach underneath and play the keys in reverse, pushing upwards on the usually unseen and untouched wooden undersides of the levers. I’d sometimes attempt to pluck the strings, but I always worried I’d de-tune it. When I saw Ben Folds play the strings of a grand piano by scraping them with the grille of his microphone, I shivered in recognition of a secret and guilty pleasure.

BoingBoing recently linked to an amazing piece on NPR about an extended technique for playing the piano, but bowing it. But the bowed piano is not bowed with traditional bows…

“The primary sound is produced by a bow of nylon fish-line, which is rosined, and that’s just threaded under the piano string and across it. There’s another kind of bow, which is a stick of wood which has horse hair affixed to it, and that’s rubbed against the strings to produce a short, percussive sound.”

The bowed-piano ensemble also uses guitar picks, Popsicle sticks, tongue depressors, and even rubber plumbing tape to expand the palette of sound colors for Scott’s compositions.

The piece also includes a video but there’s an even longer, better video on YouTube of Entrada by Stephen Scott performed by The Bowed Piano Ensemble which wonderfully demonstrates this technique.

That’s something I want to see live in concert.

I had a nice surprise waiting for me at home after a weekend away: a ‘Matter’ box, the latest project from Artomatic.

The Matter blog describes the contents better than I can. It also describes the philosophy behind it:

The idea behind Matter is to create a new kind of communications channel around the idea of giving people stuff. … In a world that seems to be increasingly dominated by digital communications, and where the net effect of those media is to render our experiences as being somewhat remote, the idea is to balance that by providing a way for advertisers and companies to start talking to people by giving them things.

It was Andy Piper, via del.icio.us, who put me onto it in the first place (thanks Andy), and I notice that he’s already got a review including a nice little unboxing video up on this blog. Dale Lane wrote up his (two) to. Bobbie Johnson has a great, thoughtful post too.

While rummaging around Flickr today I was interested to see that Adam Crowe has spotted a ‘rabbit hole’ (e.g. a hidden clue, the beginning of something else, in this case a party invite) in the Stoli leaflet.

Considering it’s free, there are some impressively cute and useful things in there. The thing that impressed me most though was the large percentage of recyclable paper and cardboard used in the packaging. The Nissan crayon soaps are packaged in a plastic box and there are small amounts of cellophane used by the Evo trumps and the Sony-Ericsson Music Monster. Everything else is packaged in card and paper, which a a very good thing indeed.

Some friends got together this weekend to celebrate Kyb’s birthday in a cottage just outside Wales, not far from Hay-on-Wye. There was wine, helium balloons, port, fires (the log-burning stove reminded me just how much I like fire), Baileys, cakes and board games.

I slept in a bunkbed for the first time in years. There were no streetlights for miles around, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been somewhere with such low light pollution. The stars are amazing, particularly on Friday night when the sky was clear. On Saturday we drove to Hay-on-Wye. It was my first visit to the town, which is twinned with Timbuktu (honestly), and apparently has more books per square mile than anywhere else. Having walked around the town, I can believe it. If you know what you’re looking for there are bargains to be had. I was choosy, and picked up 8 books (a mix of new and second hand) for a total of about £15.

The evenings were full of cake, board games and laughter. It was a huge amount of fun, and the most relaxed I’ve been for a long time. I always forget how good it is to spend quality time with good friends. Thanks everyone, and Happy Birthday, Kyb!